Tag Archives: Stare

This post is a photo gallery of tributes to Scaner that have appeared in Montreal since the writer passed away on 9 September 2017. Most of the creations are by writers doing Scan’s name, but I also found a few street art/figurative pieces celebrating Montreal’s graffiti king.

Artists did not wait for Scaner to be gone before celebrating him. A section at the end of this post features pieces honouring him after the news came out that he was terminally ill.

Time Is Gold is the name of the last production supervised by Scaner before he passed away in early September 2017. Most of his closest buddies in crews KG, DA and Four S as well as a few other friends from the Montreal graffiti scene were invited by him to contribute. The production was halfway completed at the time of Scaner’s death, so it then turned into a tribute to the writer the Montreal graff community calls their king. A candle memorial at the base of his unfinished piece was actually where his friends would congregate for a few weeks following the day Scaner passed.

The production is found on the back and side walls as well as around the playground of a private high school in central/eastern Montreal. The premises are therefore only partially accessible and should be respected.

Scaner on letters, filled by Stare and Zek, with Harry Bones on the left. From the Time Is Gold prod

The production’s main wall. Scaner did the outlines of his letters before he passed away. The fill and background of that area were completed by his brothers in KG, Stare and Zek. On the left is Scaner’s crewmate in the Four S’s, Harry Bones.

Axe Lalime, or simply Axe, is a very prolific and versatile Montreal artist active since 1995. He stems from the world of graffiti but excels in various forms of figurative art, be it mural or on canvas. He is very active with the K6A crew, but also pays allegiance to crews KG and CFC. He has in the past been a frequent collaborator on A’Shop productions.

The photo gallery below is therefore mainly split into sections featuring his graffiti pieces, his figurative work as well as the great collective projects by A’Shop and K6A to which he contributed. To see more than what I had the chance to photograph, check out his Facebook and Instagram pages and this great video showing Axe at work on various pieces featured below.

bandaid logo

Axe’s signature bandaid logo is often used to sign his murals and pieces (as seen in many instances above). It is also often painted by itself here and there as some sort of elaborate tag. The handful shown below is just a small fraction of the number I have found over the years.

Over the weekend of 22-23 April 2017 the Montreal graffiti community got together to celebrate Scaner, one of this city’s best and most respected writers/artists. For the occasion, the walls of the MPC Papers building on the corner of Cabot and Gilmore in the South West (a Montreal graffiti hotspot) were completely redone by over two dozens of Montreal’s best writers and artists, plus friends of Scaner’s who traveled from as far as the USA and Barcelona for the occasion. All in all, nearly 40 new pieces were created during the weekend, they are all shown in the gallery below.

The building where the event took place has been in the past the site of graffiti gatherings such as Meeting Of Styles/Can You Rock. This is why the event was unofficially dubbed with the pun Scan You Rock and the name stuck.

The “Jailspot” is the name given by graffiti writers and urban explorers to two contiguous abandoned buildings on Henri-Bourassa at the level of the now closed Tanguay prison. These buildings were not actually part of the closed prison, they belonged to Transport Québec who once used them as hangars for heavy machinery. They appear to have been used in the recent past as offices and warehouse space. The westernmost of the two is older than the other one which seems to have been built around 2006-2007. For the following years the latter new construction was used for sporadic warehouse sales.

Business must not have been very good, the buildings were left unused as early as 2011-2012 and signs of graffiti action started appearing, first outside then inside. Within a few years the two buildings were completely taken over by explorers and writers/artists. Everything except the warehouse at the front of the easternmost building quickly deteriorated, through the combined actions of vandals and rain/snow through broken doors and windows as well as collapsed roofs. The two buildings were finally gradually demolished over the spring and summer of 2016 to make space for the construction of controversial residential/commercial towers.

If you have any additional information about this spot, feel free to write in and contribute to this article.

The gallery below is divided by rooms and other areas where artists left their mark. The names of the rooms are not official ones, I just came up with them for comprehensive purposes. A plan of the spot can be seen below, at the top of the gallery.

This image gallery brings together 100 of the best pieces of Montreal graffiti from 2016. From a long list of over 1000, I created a ‘short’ list of 250 which I painstakingly trimmed down to the 100 seen below. The selection was done from my own personal favourites as well as those of my followers on Instagram. Of course this list was put together from what I was actually able to photograph, so keep in mind that it may lack some great work that just slipped between the cracks.

It was already difficult selecting 100 pieces, it was impossible to sort them in order of preference, so they are shown here in alphabetical order. To ensure that the list wasn’t filled with only work from a few well-loved writers, I have set a maximum of 4 pieces per artist. Collaborations by two, three or four artists under one common theme count as one entry (which means that I managed to cheat my way into actually including a bit more than 100 pieces!).